Her colleagues may have been momentarily tortured by Marsden’s loose tongue, but whether they knew it or not, they had been sticking it to her just the night before, when they brought up the Duke rape case. Gutfeld had asked what should happen to the accuser if all charges are finally dropped, and Marsden had jumped in with unusual speed, pooh-poohing possible repercussions for the woman who claimed she was raped by members of the Duke University lacrosse team a year ago. “Charges are laid, charges are dropped,” said Marsden. “It happens all the time. Unless she can get charged with mischief and they can prove she lied, then no, [she shouldn’t be punished]. That’s the process and the process works.” But, argued Gutfeld, “Don’t you think that being accused of rape is as bad as being raped? Those guys’ lives were ruined!” Marsden bit back, “Let’s give it 10 years and see if their lives were ruined.”

It was all business as usual at “Red Eye,” Fox’s bawdy gabfest of a grab at a youthful audience, starring Gutfeld, comic foil Bill Schulz, and Marsden, a statuesque Canadian who dissects the news with as much Coulter-esque zeal as she can muster while rolling her eyes at her male counterparts. But in the Duke exchange, any viewer who knew anything about Marsden, whom Fox is clearly grooming for brand-name pundit stardom, might have felt a fleeting moment of sympathy for her. That’s because the 31-year-old columnist is already well known in her native Canada as an oft-accused and once-admitted stalker who made questionable rape charges of her own 10 years ago, in a case that eventually cut short the career of a university president and changed the tenor of harassment cases all over Canada. In 1999, a professor at the same university went to the police with charges Marsden was stalking him, and in 2004 she pleaded guilty to criminally harassing a former Vancouver radio host.

Should executives at Fox News have hired Marsden as a nightly contributor to “Red Eye,” on which panelists chew over topics like sexual harassment, without disclosing how her history might color her views? In their yen for young male viewers, and their desire for a righty riposte to “The Daily Show,” is it possible they prized Marsden’s looks so much that they believed no one else would ever get past them? Did they think they could groom her to be an incendiary attention-getting conserva-babe of Coulter-esque proportions, when getting that coveted attention would guarantee the revelation of her Fox-unfriendly past? Or perhaps it was her scandal-laced life that made her enough of a celebrity to secure her a nightly perch in the first place.

“Red Eye,” designed to appeal to the demographic most likely to be found on a beer-soaked dormitory couch at 2 a.m., is chock full of fart gags and homoerotic innuendo. Into this Pabst-and-poop-joke cloud of testosterone, it’s only natural that Fox would want to bring a woman. A fox, to put no finer point on it. Enter Marsden, who for several years has been featured as the “Canadian correspondent” on “The O’Reilly Factor,” who formerly decorated her Web site with alluring photos of herself, and who was once named “Republican Babe of the Week” by JerseyGOP.com, an honor previously bestowed on Florida chad-harpy Katherine Harris, Laura Ingraham and, of course, Ann Coulter.

She also writes a weekly column for the conservative Toronto Sun, in which she revels in the sort of juvenile ad hominems about liberals beloved by righty louts. In the most recent, Marsden, an avowed disbeliever in global warming, ripped apart Al Gore‘s testimony in front of Congress, proposing that in a cross-examinations, lawmakers put this to the former vice president: “Al Gore could really pollute a bathroom … Just look at the guy. If someone doesn’t take away his pork ‘n’ beans, he’s bound to get another one of those ‘gut feelings’ and mistake his own greenhouse gas production for science!”

Marsden grew up in a suburb of Vancouver. Her father, Claude, was a high school teacher who in 2000 had his teaching license suspended after admitting to an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old student. Marsden, in the bio on her Web site, describes growing up listening to Canadian talk-radio bulldog Jack Webster. “Listening to these radio shows during visits to grandma’s house ignited a lifelong passion,” writes Marsden, adding, “Rachel finds it cute when liberals think they have an original argument. Chances are she heard it for the first time at the age of 7.” Marsden also writes that as a “former national level competitive swimmer who still holds records in BC, [she] lives for challenges and thrives on competition.”

It was swimming that led Marsden to meet Liam Donnelly at the Westminster Club where they both swam in 1990, when she was 15 and he 22. Three years later she enrolled to study biology at the famously progressive, Utopian Simon Fraser University, where Donnelly was swim coach. In 1995, she accused Donnelly, who was not her coach, of sexual harassment and date rape, claiming that he repeatedly molested her over the course of a 16-month friendship/relationship. Donnelly claimed he was innocent, and on the advice of a lawyer, boycotted the university’s investigation into Marsden’s claims.

In 1997, SFU fired Donnelly. The university agreed to pay Marsden $12,000 to compensate her for injury to her feelings and the academic scholarship she lost during the case. It was reported that they denied her request to be part of the hiring process for a new swim coach.

Donnelly fired back, alleging that it was Marsden who had done the harassing. He handed over photos of the scantily clad student that he claimed she had slipped under his door, and released an e-mail she had sent him after the date of the alleged molestation that read in part, “I suggest that you just relax and let me undress you, touch you … If you want, you can undo the garter and take off my stockings, take off my lace bra and underwear, and let your hands explore my body wherever they want to.”

According to Donnelly, Marsden had been stalking him for years, making multiple hang-up calls and showing up at his home. Donnelly claimed that this behavior had begun as early as 1992 but had worsened over time. He alleged that by 1995, someone he believed to be Marsden had vandalized his car, strewn condoms in his driveway, posted graffiti advertising his number as a phone-sex line in campus bathrooms, subscribed to Playboy in his name, and left phone messages for him with a voice-altering machine. Donnelly later told the press: “She was everywhere. She would turn up at events where I was working. She was phoning me all the time … She admitted she bought a voice-altering machine. That was the one that scared me the most. It sounds like the devil.”

Donnelly had lodged complaints with his local police departments about these occurrences in 1992, and again in 1995, when he named Marsden as the person he suspected was behind them. Sgt. Don Brown, the policeman who had investigated his claims in 1995, told the Vancouver Sun that Marsden was not charged at the time, because “there were lots of little bits and pieces, but some of it was hard to attribute to one person.”

After Donnelly’s firing and his subsequent allegations against Marsden, the fight got complicated and ugly. Women’s rights activists supported Marsden throughout her case; it was a post-Clarence Thomas universe in which the fight to keep women safe and empowered in classrooms and workplaces was finally being taken seriously. Feminist lawyer Anita Braha argued on behalf of Marsden; so did Simon Fraser’s progressive president, John Stubbs. Accusing a young harassment complainant of being a scorned, obsessive lover sounded like a low trick to sexualize and blame the victim. Even Donnelly tried to distance himself from the backlashy whiff of the controversy. “People have turned this case into one about campus harassment, the feminists versus the reactionaries,” he said to the press at the time. “I see it as a case of stalking.”

Marsden admitted to some of Donnelly’s counter-charges, while refusing to back away from her rape claim. She held a press conference in which she said she was a virgin at the time of the rape; she asserted that she gave Donnelly the sexy photos of herself after he had picked them out of her modeling portfolio, and she played the tape of a male voice she said was Donnelly’s saying, “Call me.” She claimed to have sent the suggestive e-mails in “a desperate attempt to entice [Donnelly] into meeting with me so I could obtain accountability and an apology from him for the abuse, harassment and rape I suffered at his hands.” She had also admitted to sending him the Playboy subscription, reportedly telling the SFU panel in 1996 that she did it “with the hope that he would be able to take out his sexual frustrations on the magazine instead of on real women.”

Two months after his firing, Donnelly was rehired, exonerated by the university of all charges. According to the mediation agreement between SFU and Donnelly, the original findings of the harassment panel had been based on Marsden’s credibility, which had been cast into doubt by “inconsistencies between her statements before the panel and her response to Mr. Donnelly’s harassment complaint [against her].” The school paid Donnelly $35,000 in legal fees and expunged his record of harassment charges. Marsden also kept her $12,000, meaning that SFU paid out to both sides of the conflict. An examination into what went wrong with the university inquiry culminated in the eventual resignation of president Stubbs, who stayed on as a history professor at the university.

Simon Fraser’s harassment policy coordinator Patricia O’Hagan, with whom Marsden became close during the university’s investigation into her claims, also left her job in the wake of the scandal. O’Hagan later alleged that Marsden had harassed her, claiming to reporters that the student had called her more than 400 times, tracked her down after she’d changed her number, and signed letters, “love from your daughter who loves you a lot.” Marsden responded in kind, claiming that she referred to O’Hagan as mother to “set boundaries” with the older woman, who she said had repeatedly hugged and kissed her. “I felt strange,” Marsden told the press, “and wondered what her intentions were.” O’Hagan’s lawyers told the press she “vehemently denie[d]” that she had had “any type of physical relationship” with Marsden. Two days after O’Hagan’s harassment claim, it was reported that Marsden showed up at a conference at which O’Hagan was the guest speaker.

The sordid saga wreaked havoc on the lives of Marsden, Donnelly, O’Hagan and Stubbs. But it also took a steep ideological toll on feminists.

The whole disaster read like an Oleanna-style wet dream of the right’s most misogynist thinkers, who love nothing more than a woman-makes-it-up tale to underscore the often-unprovable nature of harassment and rape claims. This situation, like the Duke rape case, was a no-win for anyone. Had Marsden been telling the truth about Donnelly, the barrage of sexualized invective hurled her way might have deterred any sane harassment victim from coming forward in the future. The suggestion that she was not telling the truth fueled the fire of those who routinely claim that women love nothing more than to lie about being assaulted and violated. As it was, Donnelly never followed through with formal charges against Marsden; the case was dropped; neither her culpability as stalker nor his culpability as rapist was ever legally established. Perhaps this small mercy in her own experience led Marsden to comment about the Duke case that “the process works.”

But for women’s rights advocates, the process did not work. They supported Marsden in her purported hour of need, only to get kicked in the gut — not simply at the time, but by her current professional persona, much of which is accessorized with snappy anti-feminist quips about how Hillary Clinton “fills out a cup better than Peyton Manning.”

“Oh god, she is feminism’s worst nightmare,” said Neil Boyd, an SFU criminology professor who claimed that Marsden harassed him too. Boyd was a vocal critic of SFU’s handling of the Donnelly case; his 2004 book “Big Sister: How Extreme Feminism Has Betrayed the Fight for Sexual Equality” was inspired in part by the case. “She used these people, who were only too willing to jump on her bandwagon,” said Boyd. “I’m not sure that she ever really presented herself as a feminist as much as she took advantage of an openness to victimization that existed on the university campus at that time.”